[New-Poetry] ;-(

[Jeff Newberry]

I'll argue in favor of punctuation, semi-colons included.  For me at least,
punctuation is as much visual as it is linguistic:  that is to say, I like
the way that certain punctuation marks look on the page.  For example, I
like to use ampersands because they remind me of treble clefs, and music and
musical rhythm are important in my poetics.  I also like semi-colons; I like
the way they exist in this liminal space between comma and period, a
half-breath, not quite a period, a little more than a comma, not quite a
colon, either.  Semi-colons balance two parts of a sentence, as though the
two clauses were children balancing on a teeter-totter.  As one side of the
sentence goes up, the other side goes down.

That said, some punctuation marks I avoid because I *don't* like how they
look:  I say away from quotation marks in poetry because they look like
chicken scratch.  When I write dialogue in poetry (and I often do), I put
the words in italics, a trick I picked up from B.H. Fairchild (I think).
Additionally, quotation marks slow down my eye when I read; they remind me
of prose.  So, I avoid them.  I also don't use dashes very often.  Perhaps,
however, I don't use dashes because so many poets that I know do indeed use
dashes.  The dash is the little black dress of poets, and since I'm a rather
large guy, I don't do little black dresses.  Seriously, though, I
consciously eschew dashes for that very reason.  In my head, they are
passe.

Ultimately, I think punctuation is a choice, as much as diction or layout.
Whether or not you use a comma is probably as personal a choice as whether
or not you write in quatrains of couplets.  Of course, as I often remind
myself, a poem will tell you what it wants if only you'll listen.  Some
poems need punctuation marks; others don't.

Best,
Jeff Newberry

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 7:04 AM, Roger Day <rog3r.day at gmail.com> wrote:

> do you need punctuation at all?
>
> On 6/24/08, jforjames at aol.com <jforjames at aol.com> wrote:
> > Richard Hugo said (paraphrase) there was no need for semi-colons in
> poetry
> > because commas could do the job, and "besides they're ugly."
> >
> >
> > The punching bag of punctuation...
> > http://www.slate.com/id/2194087
> >
> >
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